Wednesday, 15 July 2009

And so things ran along quite smoothly for the next few months. I didn’t really have any way of monitoring the website so I had no idea if anyone was visiting it. We seemed to have inherited a good organic ranking in Google but for what keywords I had no idea, as I wasn’t sure what keywords, meta-tags or indeed what an organic ranking was back then. I submitted the site to as many search engines as I could find, but never tried to get any back links, or tried to put our products on any third party sites.

The Christmas season was pretty good, but again and again we kept getting asked if it was possible to buy online and inevitably we came to the conclusion after about 9 months that what we needed was an online store.

It was time to go back to Dr Aitch and get an idea of how much this was going to cost. Surely it couldn’t be that expensive, after all it was just a matter of adding a shopping cart on the side of the current site, wasn’t it? But… didn’t someone saying something about that not being possible a year ago?

Bolting on the shopping cart of course wasn’t possible, being something to do with an incompatibility between metric and imperial thread sizes I believe and that meant a fresh start, more money, and plenty of it.

Dr Aitch gave us a very comprehensive run down of what was going to be needed and that list seemed to be extremely long, in fact it didn’t make much sense at the time, but as we progressed in trying to build the online shop I began to realise why the list was so extensive. However, that price still seemed extremely high, even after negotiations and especially considering what we had shelled out for the original site a few months ago. Then one evening at a less than sober birthday party we were recommended to Fluid Studios by someone whose name I now can’t seem to remember. Time for some competitive bidding I think.